Late Check-in

By Thomas Edmund BottomleyQuailBellMagazine.com

Surprisingly, the room itself proved far better looking than his long winding trip up there might at first have lead Mulroy to suppose.True, the fire escape slanting across one window and the tremulous neon marquee just below the other would never have been mistaken for the stuff of the choicest of accommodations. Still, the fact remained, at least in terms of its purely formal attributes, what awaited him in there, already bathed in the mellow glow of a spreading gasolier and a handsome assortment of hurricane lamps, was far more agreeable than he might have anticipated. The only aspect of the room Mulroy felt any inclination to take the slightest exception to, in fact, was on its walls: a rather oppressive helping of dingy yellow wallpaper.Yes, he thought, glancing up at that now, he could certainly have done without that. Why, it was positively creepy, that wallpaper. So creepy to have stared into its twining arabesques (William Morris meets Edward Gory, if you asked him) too long might, he half supposed, have driven even an arthritic half blind Coonhound quite mad.It wasn’t the old place’s decor, curiously agreeable, in its own musty, long, long ago sort of way, though he’d found it, that most concerned him now, however. That would have been those blasted forms. Oh, yes, that was the important thing now, he told himself. Accordingly he lowered himself onto one of the room’s ancient chairs and turned, instead, to what he’d given such short shrift to before when--much to his annoyance--they’d been more or less foisted on him. What the hell, he reasoned, couldn’t really see ’em so good before. Could’ve misjudged ’em. Heck, could’ve been just plain WRONG.

But, no, upon putting it down there this second look in no way mitigated his previous impression. They did look like tax forms. Whereas the IRS had at least been content to confine their annual interrogation to the gruesome particulars of a person’s financial affairs, however, these forms appeared to have quite another agenda.Like some kind of dotty personality test, page after page teemed with inquiries of a rather more personal nature--inquiries such as, “Thinking back over your most recent life, when would you say you were your happiest: (a.) during your infancy, not that you remember much; (b.) when tucking into enough food to feed an army; (c.) The day you finally got laid; or (d.) When you finally said the hell with it and gave in to your ceaseless craving for (check all that apply) pretty much anything fried; casual sex; booze, booze, and more booze; the good ol’ do-re-mi; or (e.) When it finally occurred to you that no matter what happened, it’d probably just turn out to be one more big fat disappointment in the long run...” And, “Omitting your parents (for question’s relating to them, see section 7(8.b.), please list the primary influences upon your most recent life, assigning each a number between 1 and 5, a 1 signifying a lesser or strictly time-specific factor, and a 5 signifying someone whose impact upon you seems to have persisted--for good or ill--to the bitter end...” And, “Now that that’s over with, what, if anything, would you say you got out of your most recent life?; (a.) a renewed sense of how ridiculous it was to have even contemplated getting mixed up in something so pointless in the first place; (b.) The knowledge that you really can’t depend on a goddamned thing--this so-called “Eternal Rest” crap included; (c.) You haven’t the foggiest idea, but you’re desperately hoping a nice long chat with the relevant authorities will clear this up soon; (d.) A deep conviction that there are no authorities, Goddammit; (e.) One helluva story; or (f.) A deep and abiding sense of ambivalence about pretty much everything...”It could not, however, have been called a questionnaire to which the very latest occupant of that ever so slightly moribund retreat devoted a great deal of careful study. “Ah, Cheezus!” he exclaimed, springing up again and flinging the lot on room’s single largest furnishing: a big, gleaming brass bed. Asking a bunch of hair-brained, none-of-your-damned-bee’s wax questions like that. It was insulting; it was despicable. It was an outrage! No, it was more then that--why, it was downright dastardly. Then--distracted--he stopped.How familiar it all sounded. All those noises still wafting up from down there, in the seamy darkness, each so tangled up in all the others you could hardly distinguish one strand from another in the ceaseless clamor of it all. Why, it almost sounded like...like a block party on a warm night in Harlem. Or New Orleans...Yes, a warm night in lusty old New Orleans...at Mardi-Gras time. That or just about any place in that desperate, intoxicating world, he’d have supposed, where night after night, in certain extra-lurid quarters, men with but one thought blazing in their brains prowled the mean streets, and old drunks bellowed garbled oaths into the still starker shadows.Going to a window, he fought through a few incidental obstructions (there was an elaborate rope portiere, then various draperies, then a filmy curtain, none of which, it was swiftly pretty obvious, had any intention of giving up the view without an especially prolonged and bitter fight) and peered down at the wild neon welter below.No, he thought, as the mummer of a pair of female voices passing in the corridor ruffled the old haunt’s sepulcher quiet, only to shatter it an instant later, as both burst into shrieks of laughter, he still didn’t want to go getting mixed up in any of that again. And it was only then, when he turned away again, that he noticed still another feature of that surprisingly congenial room, one which it must be said he now found himself turning with all the eager anticipation with which so many such weary travelers, far from home and besieged with a thousand formlessly hovering anxieties, have turned to that very amenity.Mind you, with its quaint ovoid screen, and stunning absence of anything in the way of controls but two giant Bakelite knobs, where the twin channels bulging from its metal sides culminated, it looked more like the sort of set he’d watched as a kid than anything anybody would have been using currently. But he saw no reason to hold that against it. Why, the thing even had rabbit ears.Look at ‘em! he thought, studying that bygone accessory now. The poor mangled things even harked back to the true heyday of the sordid, dead-end dive when untold scores of anguished two-timers were such an important part of their clientele. For here, too, each of the long telescoping rods had been bent into their signature configuration, at least in joints like that: the jaggedly curving outline of a sorely troubled heart.He crossed the room.Click. The old set’s bulging vacuum tube blanched, its blank, dust filmed face lowly giving way to a fierce fluorescent glow. But not quite the sort of glow Mulroy had been expecting. No, in that instant, as this new, harsher radiance burst upon the whispering gaslight, the image Mulroy beheld there wasn’t just clean and crisp, it was in what used to be referred to, ironically enough, as “Living Color.” And the nature of that image? Well, that was another matter entirely. For its focus--a beaming show hostess--also struck Mulroy as strangely familiar.Good God, he thought, it’s Gypsy Rose Lee!And it was. True, the crazy aunt’s half glasses he seemed to recall dangling into her décolletage, having once caught one of the legendary ecdysiast’s very last gigs: just such a daily gabfest, were missing now. But everything else: the bouffant topknot, the errant bang slanting over one eye, all those none too expertly capped teeth (yes, even now the woman looked like she might just as well have been charging down the stretch), was all exactly as he remembered.Any supposition that he’d stumbled upon but a flickering phantom of broadcasts past perished almost before he’d had a chance to seize any such woefully misbegotten notion, though.Another, still more startling figure had appeared now: a handsome, if somewhat jowly old fellow, Mulroy thought looked as if he might have been somewhere in his early seventies. But it was his big, square, robustly tanned head, with its thick shock of snow white hair, and those eyes--those pouchy, gleefully ogling eyes--Mulroy noticed more than anything else.No, he thought. It couldn’t be! And yet there was no denying it; the man certainly did look like him. Not that Mulroy supposed they could actually have been one and the same, this startling image swimming before him, vibrant and bright and, yes, unmistakably alive, and the dashing young POTUS it recalled with such uncanny intensity.That would have been preposterous.No, that was obviously just another one of those fascinating little coincidences. That eerie resemblance. That eerie resemblance you’d have to have been blind not to have noticed.Had to be.That wasn’t what Mulroy soon enough gathered from the audio portion of this curious broadcast, however. “Well, uh, Gypsy, those ah kind whods,” this same well-dressed septuagenarian was saying. “But, tuh, much as I enjoyed the ratha brief time it was my, uh, onna to, uh, tackle that position with, uh, vigah, I think it only fayah to say this about that. As I think you of all people ought to know, thre are ,uh, othah things in life, and the, uh, aftalife, foh that matah, besides p’forming the sometimes somewhat, uh, haza’dous duties vested in the, uh, leeda of the free whuld.”Mulroy switched channels, but that didn’t seem to matter; there was no escaping them. Channel after channel, like some fantastically expanded version of local cable access, the old box was rife with talking-heads. But though the ones doing most of the talking seemed to be the same long dead TV hosts who’d performed those duties away back during the medium’s so-called golden age, very few of them, from what Mulroy could see, had changed a whit.It was their names he sometimes struggled to remember. That beetle browed sober-sides he kept running across gamely growling inquiries through a perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke, for instance. Wasn’t that the same guy he’d once seen interviewing Marilyn Monroe, though in that instance (thanks, as he recalled, to a sort of prehistoric Jumbotron) she herself had shown up only as a sort of broadcast within a broadcast. Morrow, wasn’t it? Yes, he was almost sure it was.Still, it wasn’t so much seeing them again--absolute miracles of posthumous preservation though they mostly seemed--that startled. It was their guests. For the curious thing about all of these broadcasts was--dead and gone though all of those presiding over them were, it wasn’t, for the most part, the bygone celebrities of their own era with whom Mulroy found these remarkably well-preserved relics conversing; it was, instead, the newly dead of his own. And it appeared nary a one of them had found that condition any more of a impediment to continued knocking about, footloose and fancy free, than he had.Impassive as ever, a still flamboyantly bewigged Andy Warhol opined that he’d found death to be “sort of an...um, disappointment.” While Lucille Ball, her small, barely recognizable face still as shriveled as an Appalachian apple doll’s beneath her famous tangerine do, allowed as she hadn’t quite decided what she was going to do with “this crazy new lease on life,” but that she “sure as hell could use the time off.” And then there was the evidently equally late Sir Lawrence Oliver, a man whose appearance there Mulroy found especially startling, if only because, as of his own departure from the world’s eternal stage, at any rate, he’d assumed the legendary actor very much alive.Indeed, upon being reminded of his newfound posthumousness Mulroy found the famed actor summoning his hammiest Old Vic bark to inform his presumptuous interlocutor (it was yet another of the still feverishly smoking Murrow’s screen within a screen tête-a-têtes) he was most certainly “not dead,” and simply could not permit himself to be spoken of as someone who’d sunk to such an “insufferably low estate.”Not that that such posthumous chatter was all Mulroy found there. But it didn’t get much more cheerful then that so far as he could see. Not with all the assorted Marlboro Men still wheezing on their own coffin nails between all the dreary old Westerns and that. It wasn’t until he came upon a couple arguing against a backdrop of such suffocating, slum-dweller blight it was a miracle the respective combatants were still clinging to life, let alone capable of summoning such a robust display of sheer declamatory vim, that he switched it off for good. His sighing disappointment no less acute than any other beleaguered traveler settling into some dreary rock bottom lodging, far from more accustomed purlieus, it was a sight he reckoned that could only have lead even the most desperate of sleepless late night floor-creakers to but one chilling conclusion:If The Honeymooners, of all the insufferable TV couples to have stumbled upon on that night of all nights, were still lobbing brickbats at one another in the same grainy old black and white re-runs he’d shuddered at before he’d fetched up on that inexplicable shore, than he’d surely arrived at this remotest of human destinations only to find that even here, even now, after everything he’d been through, there still wasn’t a damned thing on.